Thursday, March 8, 2012

Correction on Agile

If you're trying to find information about agile on the internet, I hope you've found that there is a lot of wrong information out there. Let me give you a couple of examples.

In a study group about agile certification, the question came up about iteration length. One of the participants posted the following;

"Sprint duration is fixed ONLY after some smiler (sic) Sprint cycles have finished so there is no such duration fixed (sic). Books may recommend some durations for understanding purposes and in practical (sic) smaller the Sprint, more effective it is.Once the Sprint is longer than 1 month or so, then again it effects its agility anyway(sic)."

Where did that come from? What does this mean? I wonder. Scrum.org paints iterations as time boxes of fixed length. Varying sprint lengths make it difficult to judge how much can be completed or do any type of forecasting. Sprint lengths are set and shouldn't vary - based on Schwaber, Cohn, Fowler, and more.

I have other examples I'll explore next month